A Pouch of Boomerangs

$99.00

It's here!

For your middle schoolers!

Are your kids too old for the books featured in The Arrow, but perhaps not yet mature enough for some of the themes in the books for The Boomerang? You're in luck. A Pouch of Boomerangs fills in that gap. The book list is designed to be engaging for middle school students, while providing less taxing passages for copywork and dictation. The book topics offer excitement and mystery while avoiding mature content.

A Pouch of Boomerangs is designed for 6th-7th grades. The Pouch of Boomerangs is comprised of ten digital literature guides which are similar to the Boomerang, but written for the middle school set. You will receive all ten issues at once. Or the issues can be purchased as single issues by clicking on the individual titles themselves.

Age: 6-7 grades; students who are ready for the challenge of longer copywork passages, but not quite ready for the mature themes of some of the books in the regular Boomerang program.

Format: The ten PDF issues come in a Zip File that can be downloaded to your computer. Click on the Zip File to extract each individual issue and save them to your computer or tablet. Permission to print also included.

What is the Pouch Boomerang?

The Pouch Boomerang is a digital downloadable product that features copywork and dictation passages from a specific read aloud novel.

It is the indispensable tool for Brave Writer parents who want to teach language arts in a natural, literature-bathed context, using copywork and dictation. It is a language arts resource that equips you, the homeschooling parent, to fulfill your best intentions related to:

Spelling

Punctuation

Grammar

Literary elements

Quality living literature

Literary analysis

The practices of copywork and dictation teach your children the fundamentals of written communication. These practices naturally facilitate the development of accurate mechanics in the context of quality literature (the best words, in the best style, accurately edited).

The Skinny

Each month, the Boomerang features one classic novel to be read by the student.

Each week, it features a selected passage from that novel. The passages are accompanied by notes that detail spelling, punctuation, grammar and literary style elements found in the passage. These notes are designed to make it easy to pre-teach the passage (no advanced preparation necessary).

Each issue also provides "Think Piece" Questions that provoke deeper investigation of the novel’s themes, plot, and characters. These questions are meant for both written responses and conversation to facilitate rich literary analysis.

Each month, students are encouraged to select their favorite passgages from the book and to keep them in a special notebook. We call these "Golden Lines." These are to be accompanied by thoughtful comments by the student.

How do I use the Boomerang?

You and your child will read the passage out loud to hear the musicality of the language, to notice the correct use of apostrophes or semi-colons, to note new vocabulary and tricky spellings, to pay attention to the grammatical structure or the special dialog punctuation. The Boomerang supplies you with notes to help you notice what you might overlook in the passage. The Boomerang helps you identify why the writing works and is enjoyable to read, as well as highlighting excellent uses of punctuation or alliteration or description.

After you’ve enjoyed the passage together, your child will either copy it into a copy book attempting to reproduce it exactly, paying close attention to all of the spelling and mechanical demands of the passage (copywork), or you will read the passage to your child and he or she will write it out onto a sheet of paper while listening to you, attempting to remember how to punctuate and spell the passage correctly (dictation). Copywork/dictation done about once a week over several years does more to increase your child’s ability to punctuate and spell correctly than any other practice I’ve ever run across.

Consistent copywork/dictation practice allows you, the home educator, to use quality literature to cover the aspects of writing that you care most about without the tedium of workbook sentences isolated from the context of real writing.

The "Think Piece" Questions can be used throughout the month for discussion and/or writing.